I met Cara when she attended my very first Danielle Poff Workshop in 2014 at Flying Caballos Ranch in San Luis Obispo! She’s still shooting weddings which makes me so happy and I felt honored when she asked me to shoot her engagement photos.

Kelsey and Ryan came down to San Luis Obispo for the weekend to celebrate their anniversary and to meet up with me for their engagement session. We started in downtown SLO then headed out to MDO to end their shoot. We laughed a lot and got to know each other, and it makes me so excited for their fall wedding at Higuera Ranch!

We've been friends with Mo since high school, so it's going to be awesome to shoot his wedding next April! We've gotten closer with Mo and Amanda over the last few years and we even took a vacation to Kauai with them back in 2016 (wow time flies). I remember sitting in the hot tub on vacation talking with Amanda about their future engagement, and now here we are and they are planning their wedding! They came down to SLO for their engagement session, which also happens to be the area they picked for their wedding. They looked around at venues in the Bay Area (where they live), but ultimately decided on a venue on the Central Coast because it's right in their middle for both of their families. Plus this area is just so amazing and perfect for a wedding weekend! It's going to be a fun day at Spanish Oaks Ranch next Spring, but for now, enjoy their engagement session :)

Brandon and I got engaged this past Christmas! After exchanging our gifts we got for each other, he said he “still has one more gift” for me, immediately I started freaking out inside, he took the ring box out of his pocket and proposed- I was in shock! Even after being together for over 8 years at the time, he completely surprised me with the proposal!

We chose Joshua Tree for our engagement session location because it’s such a unique and beautiful place, I fell in love with it when I first went there last year! I love the desert (and would probably get married there if it was closer!), but since our wedding venue will be closer to the coast, it was the perfect opportunity to get some pretty desert photos for our engagement session! We decided to bring our friends along for the trip out to Joshua Tree and make it into a fun little weekend getaway and had Danielle meet us out there to do a sunrise shoot (since of course it was raining on the evening we wanted to originally shoot on!). It was still fun to get up super early and head out to watch the sunrise in the desert!

While choosing our outfits, I wanted to pick colors and prints that would go well with our personal styles, but also the style of our wedding design. We are planning to have lots of peachy, pink, and orange flowers and printed blue linens for our wedding, so I used those elements as inspiration while picking out my dresses and Brandon’s outfits. I wore an orange floral wrap dress from Anthropologie and an off the shoulder floral dress from Show Me Your Mumu. Brandon wore dark denim jeans and two blue button up shirts from JCrew. I love the pops of color against the more muted desert landscape! Lastly, since my friends know I love flowers so much, they surprised me with a floral crown and bouquet made by The Bloomin’ Gypsy for our engagement photos!! It was the sweetest gift and really made the photos that much more special!

I love that we chose such a cool place for our engagement session, and I know we will always have a special connection to Joshua Tree because of that! We cannot wait for our wedding next Spring, and these beautiful photos Danielle took of us make us even more excited to see what she captures on our wedding day!!